CBS sit-com "Two and a Half Men" highlights the lives of a nerdy father, Alan, and his pre-pubescent son, Jake,  who move in with Charlie, Alan's bachelor brother. The show is sexist at best. It's the classic bachelor pad sit-com, treating women as things to be used and tossed away, and highlighting the ridiculousities of the brothers' lives while the young boy just follows in his uncle's footsteps. 

I don't pay for cable, so I am stuck watching whatever is on the few channels that I actually get, therefore the only reason that I caught this episode is because I like background noise during dinner. 

And in retrospect I am pretty glad that I caught this rerun. It features the womanizing brother character, Charlie who has been contacted by a previous girlfriend, Jill. He is excited to meet her because she stands out amongst all of his other lovers simply because of her aggressive nature and other non-gender-conforming behaviors. He goes to meet this Jill and ends up waiting at the bar with a man named Bill. Charlie assumes that both he and Bill have been stood up, until Bill explains that he is actually the one that Charlie was waiting for, and Bill is in fact Jill. 

The episode goes on to portray Charlie's shock upon finding his ex-lover to be a man. He grapples with his identity as a straight man for a bit. He corrects Bill's gender discretions. And then the plot takes a ridiculous turn as Charlie's mother starts to date Bill. 

A few clips from the episode can be found below. 





The first clip shows Charlie meeting Bill at the bar and then learning Bill's true identity. The second portrays Bill explaining to Charlie's mother, Evelyn Harper (played by Holland Taylor who also played Helena's mother Peggy Peabody on the L Word, who was revealed to be somewhat queer in that show too) that he was previously Jill, Charlie's ex-girlfriend, and then continues to show Charlie's mother weighing her options and ultimately deciding to date Bill. 

This episode has problems I am not going to deny that. Ideally it would be fantastic if TV shows, commercials, movies just has queer and gender-nonconforming characters in them that were just that characters and not the entirety of the plot. 

Regardless for "Two and a Half Men" being such a crappy show in general I was somewhat impressed with the way this issue was handled. 

First of all the question of how and why was never addressed. The characters did not dwell on how Bill went about becoming a man. They didn't make a skeptical of his transition by going into the specifics of what body parts he had or did not have as so many people do to transgender individuals. As a matter of fact the show presented the whole issue of transition as a non-issue at all. It was simply Billy's previous identity that was the issue not his physical anatomy. 

The show depicted Charlie questioning his identity, which is something that many partners (or previous partners) of transgender individuals go through. Charlie wonders if having slept with Bill in fact makes him gay or threatens his heterosexual identity. Of course the fact that Charlie feels his only options are gay and straight and that gay would be a bad thing is still an issue in and of itself. 

Also Charlie agreed to be friends with Bill, which to me indicated acceptance. A lot of other shows with a plotline similar to this may have shown Bill being completely rejected. It was problematic that Charlie, as Bill's friend, felt the need to constantly correct Bill's behavior to make sure that he was passing and behaving in a masculine way. But Charlie didn't seem to have any trouble with using the correct name and pronoun for Bill nor did he purposefully call him the incorrect name and pronoun or other offensive names or female-gendered language.


The show also dealt with the concept of well-passing transgender individuals who have to then come out to prospective dates and partners. This is shown in the second youtube clip above and it seems that it was actually the fact that Bill had slept with her son Charlie that upset her more than the fact that he was transgender and in the end Evelyn does decide to continue dating him although some of her reasons may be flawed. 

Overall I was impressed with the way that this overall sexist TV show handled the issue of transgenderism. Don't get me wrong, the show is still crappy and they definitely didn't handle this episode perfectly. The laugh track was no help, being played to encourage people to laugh at Bill's identity, and failing to ever use the word transgender and introduce it into the audience's vocabulary was also unfortunate. 

But overall I think the episode definitely was not as bad as it could have been. Especially for "Two and a Half Men"